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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29520597">red red heart</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/'>Anonymous</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Gen, Past Abuse</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 16:49:35</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>775</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29520597</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It has been centuries. She remembers days when she thought nothing would ever make her feel clean again.</i> (Archive 2016)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Richard Gecko/Santanico Pandemonium | Kisa</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Anonymous Fics</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>red red heart</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>written for Morbid and Spooky Ficathon. Turned out much less Richie/Santanico than Santanico gen, but I'm mostly just trying hard to get back into the swing of writing things. It's a rough piece, but I hope you enjoy it!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>His throat trembles. His mouth trembles, damp. Behind his glasses his eyes are wide and glistening. His shoulders are broad but he looks small to her, in this instant, as they always look small in the moment before she wraps them in her arms and pops her fangs down. For him the moment stretches--has stretched--and Santanico is suspended in it as well, trapped in her own web, watching him march to his own doom.</p>
<p>She needs him to move towards her, so she must be flawless. She must be tempting and terrifying, and she must show no cracks of uncertainty that would loosen the hold of her phantom on him. Men are drawn to puzzles as much as they are drawn to a warm stretch of neck or thigh. They wish to exert control, to unweave the puzzle, to proclaim their mastery.</p>
<p>She licks her lips, ignores the sick well in her stomach. Briefly she hates him, hates herself, hates the whisper of feet on the Twister’s floor outside of her dreaming mind. Deep inside of her is a poison of such violence and malice that it could char them all, char the very stone, melt it into runnels of volcanic heat. She draws on it daily.</p>
<p>It has been centuries. She remembers days when she thought nothing would ever make her feel clean again.</p>
<p>But there are lessons you learn. After a hundred years and then a hundred more, you bear up under the pain. You bring yourself into new shapes. The blood baths she sinks into as if she could drown, the meaty choke of the red pouring into her skin, her mouth. The anger she draws on when a sweaty palm leaves a smear of grease along her leg, the turn of her waist. Inside her its violence is clean. If she walks across the coals, the needles, the thorn-laden ground--the small sharp pains and clutching humiliations of this place--it’s for an end. They are for a purpose. There will <i>be</i> an end.</p>
<p>She will never be that falling girl again, she could leap from the pit, she could rise from a broken ankle. Santanico rises from her seat and approaches her mirror. She begins to dress for the night, and Richie Gecko’s pallid face swims out of the recesses of her mind and hovers before her eyes. She strips the image of sentimental meaning, forcibly. Strips it of meaningful pain. She has to see only the key for her lock.</p>
<p>Malvado thinks she’s so stupid, so weak, that she won’t see he gives his slaves strength to escape the trials that dogged their prior lives only once he’s installed even more secure chains over the new flesh, the new scales. He thinks if he bludgeons her enough with the mythology he’s built, the stories he half-believes himself (believes just enough to keep himself comfortable) she’ll begin to swallow it and keep it in her stomach. She’ll believe what he gives her is love. She’ll believe there’s nothing better out there in the raw, pitiless night of the world.</p>
<p>
  <i>Anything is better.</i>
</p>
<p>But then, a man who wants to see surrender will see it in any gesture of submission. His lies choke her, his smiles and the hard pinch of his hands while he whispers his love, whispers <i>her</i> love, and deep down past his lies believes he can keep the yoke pulled tight enough that she won’t ever be able to call them into question. Soon, she’ll make his lies choke <i>him</i> instead.</p>
<p>Richie Gecko looks at her through--glass? The glaze of a stranger’s eyes? Sometimes details are razor sharp, sometimes they swim. She holds onto him when they swim; the inside of a convenience store, the crisp beads of condensing water on the cans, those aren’t so important as the tremble of his breath.</p>
<p>He wants the mystery. He wants the power, and the wet red sheen of her lips. She recognizes in him what she’s seen in Malvado when he bends low over her, what she’s seen in Carlos, what she sees when Narciso throws his head back and laughs, so pleased with himself. The greed of men is always waiting behind their smiles.</p>
<p>Santanico has her own greed. When it emerges, it won't be in a temper tantrum, twisting away the facile smile in petulant rage. She'll smile <i>while</i> she pulls them apart, joint by joint, pink muscle to blue vein, red-washed tendon. It will be a different smile, but it will be a smile; her greed <i>is</i> a smile, is a night sky.</p>
<p>And it isn't going to wait for much longer.</p>
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